“Novelists, like other cattle, have to obey their owner,” he said lightly.
I thought for a moment that he meant the Major, and was breaking into an angry remonstrance, when I saw that he meant something quite different. It was always his strongest point, this extraordinary consciousness of right, this unwavering belief that he had to do and therefore could do certain things. Without this, I know that he never wrote a line, and in my heart I believe this was the cause of his success.
“Then you are not writing at all?” I asked.
“Yes, I write generally for a couple of hours before breakfast,” he said.
And that evening we sat by his gas stove and he read me the next four chapters of ‘Lynwood.’ He had rather a dismal lodging-house bedroom, with faded wall-paper and a prosaic snuff-coloured carpet. On a rickety table in the window was his desk, and a portfolio full of blue foolscap, but he had done what he could to make the place habitable; his Oxford pictures were on the walls—Hoffman’s ‘Christ speaking to the Woman taken in Adultery,’ hanging over the mantelpiece—it had always been a favourite of his. I remember that, as he read the description of Lynwood and his wife, I kept looking from him to the Christ in the picture till I could almost have fancied that each face bore the same expression. Had this strange monotonous life with that old brute of a Major brought him some new perception of those words, “Neither do I condemn thee”? But when he stopped reading, I, true to my character, forgot his affairs in my own, as we sat talking far into the night—talking of that luckless month at Mondisfield, of all the problems it had opened up, and of my wretchedness.
“You were in town all September?” he asked; “you gave up Blachington?”
“Yes,” I replied. “What did I care for country houses in such a mood as that.”
He acquiesced, and I went on talking of my grievances, and it was not till I was in the train on my way back to London that I remembered how a look of disappointment had passed over his face just at the moment. Evidently he had counted on learning something about Freda from me, and I—well, I had clean forgotten both her existence and his passionate love.
Something, probably self-interest, the desire for my friend’s company, and so forth, took me down to Bath pretty frequently in those days; luckily the Major had a sort of liking for me, and was always polite enough; and dear old Derrick—well, I believe my visits really helped to brighten him up. At any rate he said he couldn’t have borne his life without them, and for a sceptical, dismal, cynical fellow like me to hear that was somehow flattering. The mere force of contrast did me good. I used to come back on the Monday wondering that Derrick didn’t cut his throat, and realising that, after all, it was something to be a free agent, and to have comfortable rooms in Montague Street, with no old bear of a drunkard to disturb my peace. And then a sort of admiration sprang up in my heart, and the cynicism bred of melancholy broodings over solitary pipes was less rampant than usual.
It was, I think, early in the new year that I met Lawrence Vaughan in Bath. He was not staying at Gay Street, so I could still have the vacant room next to Derrick’s. Lawrence put up at the York House Hotel.